A Review on Drug Repurposing: A Strategy to Treat Human Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19)

Abstract

Novel coronavirus pandemic has created a massive public health emergency causing around 1.85 million deaths world-wide till 5th January, 2021. New SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) coronavirus strain known as SARS-CoV-2 is the causative agent which infected more than 84 million people across the globe. Current epicentre of the pandemic has shifted to Europe and United States and Indian subcontinent from its place of origin-Wuhan City, Hubei province in China. Due to limited availability of vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 or its related β-coronavirus (SARS-CoV or MERS-CoV), mass immunization is currently not possible. Thus, use of curative therapies could be the only choice of intervention. Therefore, rapid treatment of millions of COVID-19 patients in limited time can only be achieved by repurposing pre-approved and existing drugs. Network-based high-throughput computational approach has also predicted several repurposable drugs. Cheaper, less toxic and well tolerated drugs such as antimalarial drugs: Chloroquine (CQ) & Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ); antiviral drugs: Remdesivir, Lopinavir and Ritonavir are among many others that have been proposed for the COVID-19 treatment. Presently limited controlled clinical trials are underway to assess the therapeutic outcome of these repurposed drugs along with novel candidate vaccines and medicines. Beside these, convalescent plasma therapy has also emerged as potential therapeutic approach being tested in several countries. This review focuses on few of the promising repurposed drugs and their outcomes that are presently under evaluation for their safety and efficacy against the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).